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GALLANT Gregory

GALLANT Gregory (SETH)

(Nom de plume “Seth.”)

Circa 1990’s. It’s A Great Life If You Don’t Weaken.

“I think that if there’s any hope of raising the medium, you have to think of yourself as an artist and the story has to have literary concerns. You’ve really got to try to consciously craft something that has real meaning.” Globe and Mail 11 Sept.1993: C1.

Gallant earns a living as a illustrator for publications such as Saturday Night, Toronto Life and The Washington Post. He remarked to journalist Cathal Kelly, “The comic [Palookaville] doesn’t buy me anything. Well maybe a hamburger.”

He was part of a group which included his two friends Chester Brown and Joe Matt which mined the autobiographical cartoon genre so prevalent in the early 1990’s. “It’s a reaction against what’s always gone on in comics, which is way too much fantasy. So much fantasy that as a sheer reaction to get away from it , you want to [tell] the most real thing [you] knew, which was you own life.” [C1] Although the comic books of these three sold in small quantities per issue (3000 – 7000), they attracted mail from across North America, Europe and Asia.

He was one of the illustrators on Dean Motter’s Mr. X.

Gallant had an idea for a comic he named Palookaville. Oliveros owner of Drawn and Quarterly decided to publish it. Gallant became one of the company’s core artists. Palookaville, is in reality Toronto,and tells slice of life stories based on the artist’s own experiences. The first issue dealt with Gallant being mistaken for a homosexual and beaten up in a Toronto subway station in the mid 1980’s. It has been described as wielding the great emotional power of a good short story.

While the three friends Gallant, Brown and Matt have all exploited the autobiographical vein of cartoon stories to the maximum all three in 1993 were wanting to move away from it into fiction and history.

In 1996 Oliveros and the Drawn and Quarterly artists were featured guests at the Haarlem Comics Festival in the Netherlands in Europe.

He won the 2005 Doug Wright Best Book Award for Clyde Fans Book 1 and the 2010 Doug Wright Best Book Award for George Sprott (1894-1975).

Left to right: Joe Matt, Chester Brown, Gregory Gallant (Seth) A jam cartoon in which each artist did a self portrait as he expected to be at “50 years down the road”. Comics Journal, 162, October 1993: 53